We’re shifting the Milton Society of America from a commercial server to the CUNY Commons, and were planning to use the All-in-one WP Migration plugin to shift everything over with ease. But the plugin doesn’t seem to be available. Can you either add it to the available list, or provide us with an alternative for site migration which won’t prove too technical for several professors of English?

He replies:"As I understand it, the default tools brings the page structure and text but none of the additional files. If memory serves, the Wordpress export file comes in around 850K and the All-In-One file is about 140MB.I've not done a migration before, but manually downloading, reuploading and relinking every single one of those media files sounds like a considerable bother. I'd hoped there was an automated way to do that compatible with the Commons."

Let me know what to tell him. I can't see how much work he's talking about because much of the existing site is password protected.

The size of the WordPress export file depends on the amount of content that's being exported. It's true that it can be rather large, and that the import process can be a bit cumbersome as a result.

If the user has attempted an import using the default tools, but has failed due to the size of imported files, I'd suggest that they make the export file available to me, and I'll perform the import. I've got access to certain tools that make it possible to bypass some server restrictions on execution time and memory limits.

As for media files: the WordPress importer can fetch and attach remote attachments, as long as the source site is publicly available. If this is not the case, and the site cannot be made publicly available even on a temporary basis, then the user could send me a zip of the uploads directory (probably wp-content/uploads) and I'll process it manually.

Hi Marilyn - Did you ever hear anything back from the reporter about this? I'd be glad to help with migration, though it's likely that this help would have to be through manual intervention rather than new tools (the tools aren't likely to work around certain fundamental technical limits on the Commons).